Tag: Atmosphere

Snow and the various forms of ice - the cryosphere - play different roles within the climate system. The two continental ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland actively influence the global climate over time scales of mi...

Atmospheric deposition currently accounts for roughly 12% of the reactive nitrogen entering terrestrial and coastal marine ecosystems globally, although in some regions, atmospheric deposition accounts for a higher perce...

The time scale of change refers to the time required for the effects of a perturbation of a process to be expressed. Inertia refers to the delay or slowness in the response of a system to factors altering their rate of c...

Changes in land use have negatively affected the net ability of ecosystems to sequester carbon from the atmosphere. For instance, the carbon rich grasslands and forests in temperate zones have been replaced by crops with...

The more recent history, from the middle ages and up until now, show increasing temperatures, rising as the world emerged from the Little Ice Age (LIA), around 1850. With the industrial era, human activities have at the ...

Climate change, due to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, has not lead as clear changes in the Antarctic as in the Arctic. Some of the ice shelves of the Antarctic peninsula have split up and...

Climate change, due to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, has lead to increased temperatures and large scale changes in the Arctic. The Arctic sea ice is decreasing, permafrost thawing and th...

Without the contribution of oceans and coastal ecosystems to global biological carbon
sequestration today’s CO2 concentration in the atmosphere would be much larger than
it is. But the uptake capacity of oceans and coa...

Climate change manifests itself primarily through a gradual increase in the average temperatures of the earth’s surface, alterations in precipitation patterns, changes in the intensity and/or frequency of extreme climati...

Human activities are causing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere to increase. This graphic explains how solar energy is absorbed by the earth's surface, causing the earth to warm and to emit infrared radiation. The g...

This graphic illustrates the strong link between areas with high densities of industrial activity and zones of seasonally oxygen-depleted waters.
There is a strong link between areas with high densities of industrial ac...

An important role played by the ocean is the storage and exchange of CO2 with the atmosphere, and its diffusion toward deeper layers. At high latitudes, dense waters sink, transferring carbon to the deep ocean. Warming o...

The carbon captured by living organisms in oceans is stored in the form of sediments from mangroves, salt marshes and seagrasses. Benefiting from the excellent conditions available to support plant growth, vegetated coas...